Millions of people perform tens of millions of searches every day. Many of those searches, for one reason or another, are misspelled. If a web page contains those misspellings it will have the advantage over those that don’t, and it will appear in the search results!

The thing is, coming up with all of those typos by hand is a tedious process. For example, TypoPositive can generate over 31,000 different spellings for “misspelling” alone. Did you consider every type of typo (double strike, transposition, etc.)? Should you worry about multiple typos in one word?

You have better things to do with your time. TypoPositive does all of this for you automatically in a few seconds.

Types of Typos

Examples

Misspelling

“britney spears” —> “brittany spears”

Transposition

“britney spears” —> “britneys pears”

Omission

“britney spears” —> “britny spears”

Double Strike

“britney spears” —> “brittney spears”

Wrong Key

“britney spears” —> “brotney spears”

Why the obsession with America’s pop darling Britney Spears? The idea for this program was born when Sergey Brin (cofounder of Google) was interviewed on NPR. As an informational anecdote he mentioned that there were about 600 common misspellings for “Britney Spears”. (A list of those variations is hosted on the Google site, here.) In fact, about 20% of the time “Britney Spears” is misspelled when people search for it on Google. If a person running a Britney Spears web site wants to get the maximum exposure, it would be in their best interests to include at least a few misspellings.